Serotonin: A Novel

The whole point of bureaucracy is to reduce the possibilities of your life to the greatest possible degree when it doesn’t simply succeed in destroying them; from the bureaucratic point of view, a good citizen is a dead citizen.

since it’s true that in the middle of our own dramas we are reassured by the existence of others that we have been spared.

Men in general don’t know how to live: they have no true familiarity with life, and never feel entirely at ease in it, so they pursue different projects, more or less ambitious and more or less grandiose – generally speaking, of course, they fail and reach the conclusion that they would have been better off just living, but as a rule by that point

it isn’t the future but the past that kills you, that comes back to torment and undermine you, and effectively ends up killing you.

you really can’t do anything about people’s lives, I said to myself, neither friendship nor compassion nor the intelligence of situations is of any use: people manufacture the mechanism of their own misfortune, they wind it right up and the mechanism goes on turning, ineluctably, with the odd mistake, a few errors when there’s sickness in the mix,

Now, however, I was going to stick them on the wall, each one in its place, not in the hope that they would exude any kind of beauty or meaning; but I would still carry on to the end, because I could, I could in material terms; it was a task physically within my range. So I did.

The outside world was harsh, merciless towards the weak, and hardly ever kept its promises, and love remained the only thing in which one could still, perhaps, have faith.

our student years are the only happy ones, when the future seems open, when everything seems possible, and after that adulthood and a career are only a slow and progressive process of ending up in a rut. That’s probably also why the friendships of our youth, the ones we make during our time as students and which are our only true friendships, never

To tell the truth, if I had been a stag or a Brazilian macaque, the question wouldn’t even have arisen: the first action of a male mammal when he conquers a female is to destroy all her previous offspring to ensure the pre-eminence of his genotype. This attitude had been maintained for a long time in the first human populations.